Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches examines Nebraska Republican Senate primary winner Ben Sasse’s 2004 doctoral dissertation. Sasse’s academic work helps explain his current political perspective, “one in which religion—and, more critically, ‘elite’ dismissal of it—takes center stage in the story of America.” Sasse wrote about the rise of the religious right, arguing that it was a bottom-up effort to maintain religion in a changing America, “a consequence of fears … about the evaporation of a religious understanding of a nation.”